Network appliances, such as high end distributed security gateway, have been used for protecting networks from various attacks, intrusions detection and prevention, providing high performance packet routing, and other application services. In some cases, such network appliance may include multiple processing units for performing different packet processing functions. Such processing units may be managed by a centralized CPU, which hosts a centralized database for storing all information for all of the multiple processing units.
Applicant of the subject application has determined that it may be desirable to have a network system that uses a distributed database, rather than a centralized database, for processing packets. Also, applicant of the subject application has determined that it may be desirable to implement such network system using virtual machines.